Buseck Center for Meteorite Studies

Thuathe is an ordinary (H4/5) chondrite that fell in Lesotho the afternoon of July 21, 2002. According to the Meteoritical Bulletin (MB 87), the meteorite exploded over Lesotho, approximately 12 km east of the capital city of Maseru. The explosion was accompanied by an extraordinarily loud, 15 s long noise which was heard over a…

Ibitira is an achondrite (Eucrite-mmict) that fell in Minas Gerais, Brazil, the evening of June 30, 1957. According to the Meteoritical Bulletin (MB 6): The fireball passed northwestward and accompanied with a noise like the reverberation of thunder has been observed. This phenomenon has been marked in the radius about 160 km. At the end…

On April 23 at 9:09 p.m. local time, residents of Aguas Zarcas, a small town in Costa Rica, saw a large “fireball” in the sky. The reported fireball was a meteor about the size of a washing machine. As it entered Earth’s atmosphere, it broke apart and rained hundreds of meteorites in and around the small…

Center Research Scientist Dr. Jemma Davidson is part of a team that discovered a carbon-rich fragment inside the primitive asteroidal meteorite, LaPaz Icefield 02342, found in Antarctica.  The team was led by the Carnegie Institution for Science's Larry Nittler, and the discovery was recently published in Nature Astronomy. Read the article in Nature Astronomy here!…

The ASU Center for Meteorite Studies is pleased to announce that Jonathan Lewis, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at Johnson Space Center is the recipient of the 2018 Nininger Meteorite Award, and Zachary Torrano, a Ph.D. Candidate in the ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration received an Honorable Mention for the award. The Nininger…